SLC: Service Learning Journal

Hispanola—Questions without Answers

Introduction

When I made the decision to travel to an orphanage in the Dominican Republic during spring break of my freshman year of college, many people told me that the experience would be life-changing. I didn’t believe them. After all, how could one week change a person’s entire life? I began keeping a journal the night before leaving, and it was full of doubt and American arrogance. I was traveling with the notion that I was going to “help people,” as if spreading my culture was a method of enlightenment. My only excuse is that I was in many ways very young. I was nineteen years old, embarking on a journey with no real idea of where I was going. I was willing to throw myself into an intellectual void—a first ill-planed indulgence of my sense of adventure and philanthropy. Looking back, I was both closed-minded and guilty of the dreaded anthropological curse of ethnocentrism. I was wholly unprepared for the challenge to my entrenched emotional and intellectual ideals that I was about to face. But, I learned—I came home with different views, and a host of mental images that would never leave. One single week, one brief journey, was enough to make a college freshman see the problems of the world in a new and radically different light. This is a retelling of that journey.

Santiago

I grew up in Altoona, a railroad town in Pennsylvania, whose days of prominence and glory were long past. My grandparents had immigrated from Germany, Ireland, and England for the illusion of a better life across the Atlantic. They had made their respective ways into interior of the east coast, settling amid the tiny rolling mountains indicative of central Pennsylvania. No images survive of these men but the ones I have built in my mind. Especially poignant is the mental portrait of Grandmother Dodson’s father, my paternal great-Grandfather Dunn. As a child, I listened to my grandmother’s stories of him, remembrances tinted with a child-like affection. He stands clearly in my mind, one eye an empty socket set in his laughing face, a thick gentle hand marred by a middle finger clipped short just above the first joint. One eye, part to a finger were a small price to pay for the high wages of the Pennsylvania Railroad shops, the largest hub of railroad research, development, and repair in the entire world. Two generations and one college education removed, I wonder what he felt, chasing the dream of a better life, dying in the heat and steam of a factory so far from the land of his birth. I grew up, fueled on family stories, to a college career filled with the study of American history, considering myself the ideological champion of immigrant rights and ethnic equality.

My family has been Altoona since Grandpa Dunn’s first settlement there. The days of hopeful prosperity passed slowly into the void of time, but they stayed. Solid fixtures of responsibility, they carved out an existence amid economic poverty, showing none of his inkling to travel and resettle. I, however, carried what I imagined to be his impulse to move, to see the world—my philosophical inheritance from a man who died in search of prosperity. I was two months into the first term of my freshman year—the first of any member of my family, when I decided to sign up for a trip over spring break. It was an alternative spring break trip—a chance to work and live at an orphanage in the Dominican Republic at relatively little cost. Lacking the luxury of an over-prosperous birth, I viewed this trip as an opportunity to see some small corner of the world that I might never view otherwise. It was this impulse that found me sitting, two months later, on a bus bound for the Pittsburgh Airport, a mere three layovers from the Dominican Republic’s Santiago.

Sitting on the idling bus, back pressed against the lumpy seat, I began to write from boredom and a healthy dose of nervous energy. I observed and reflected in only the shallowest of ways. As I wrote, “People around me are desperately trying to learn Spanish. A bit late to start if you ask me, but who am I to tell. I’ll probably be freaking out this time tomorrow b/c I can’t understand the language. Oh, well, we shall see” (3/5/05). I was afraid, although my writings do not show it—it was a gut-level fear that I was hesitant to even admit to myself, let alone commit to writing. All that I knew about the Dominican Republic at that time was that it was off the cost of Florida, swimming somewhere in the well-explored waters of the southern Atlantic Ocean. Distracted by the first woes of a college freshman, I’d never even begun the exploratory research that a seasoned traveler would never plan an excursion without. A typical American, I never paused to consider that three years of Spanish classes might not help me to interact with a culture that I knew nothing about. I had never traveled outside of the United States and so knew nothing, expected nothing. At the time my only tangible fear was that I hadn’t managed to cram enough clothing and entertainments into the one carry-on bag that we were allowed to use as personal luggage (we had filled out checked luggage materials to be donated to the orphanage).

It was nearing sunset when out plane landed in Santiago, nearly 24 hours after our initial departure from Pittsburgh. Planes do not make the best hotel rooms, and so we all stood outside of the airport, faces a blank daze of exhaustion, as we waited for our bus. The busses that arrived may have been state of the art in 1950s America, but they were certainly not what we were accustomed to. While a group of smiling men bailed our few possessions and suitcases of donated items into one bus, we tried to settle into the other. Unfortunately, here I learned my first and easiest lesson about people from my home nation—we’re large. In fact, compared to many of the Dominicans that we interacted with, we Americans were huge. Suddenly the idea of lebensraum took on new, uncomfortable connotations. Every seat on the bus was filled, and padded boards were suspended between isles as auxiliary seating. With every jostle in the road the entire mass or people swayed as if one. We rode like this, with no air conditioning other than the open windows, for the entire six hour drive from the airport to the orphanage in the poor rural village of Esperanza. For me, the one comfort was the music blaring from the driver’s speaker system. I understood the driver’s Spanish enough to learn that this was merengue. The music begged for dance, one could see a kaleidoscope of reds, yellows, and blues in all of their primary colored glory. The high trumpet notes were piercing, the rhythms driving, and every not spoke of unfading summer. To me, the meringue was as beautiful as it was unfamiliar.

As we pulled into orphanage property, a whirling dance of confusion began. The bus was immediately surrounded by a huge group of children shouting, “Americanos!” Many of the children tried to speak with me, although I was lucky to understand one word in ten of their rolling, rhythmic dialect of Spanish, more beautiful and incomprehensible than anything I had ever heard in an American classroom. We were ushered off into a building our hosts called a ramada, which was to be our quarters from the duration of our stay. The building itself offered little protection from the elements, as I described in my journal, “The walls are of chain-link fence that is covered in plastic canvas tart up to within three or four feet of the roof. The roof itself is corrugated metal and wood…my bunk is a metal frame…covered in lime-green mosquito netting…it feels a little too open” (03/05/05). I fell asleep that night to the sound of my fellow American women complaining at the accommodations and screaming in fright when a moth invaded their personal space.

Esperanza

The (much-hated) roosters work us up promptly at 4:30 am. When the sun was up, the bug-phobic, complaining college women and I toured the orphanage and surrounding town. I wrote of the journey, “compared to the kids we live like kings [here], sure it’s weird to have mosquito nets, but the kids don’t have them at all…our showers are cold and we limit water use, but at least our showers are inside, not just four walls and a drain that it outside…I’m trying not to think about all the stuff that I have at home” (03/06/05). It was my first brush with a society with so many fewer material goods than my own. I had never thought about international inequality before. Childhood remembrances of Earth Day and episodes of Captain Planet aside, I had never really considered that I might be part of a throw-away culture. I had been told such shocking facts as “America is home to 5% of the world's population, yet it consumes 1/3 of the Earth's timber and paper; making paper the largest part of the waste stream at 37.5% of the total waste stream,” and “Americans toss out enough paper & plastic cups, forks and spoons every year to circle the equator 300 times” (Clean Air Council). It is one thing to be told how materialistic and wasteful you are, it is quite another type of shock to actually visit a place with this fact of life is less prevalent. In touring the village of Esperanza, I saw what I would have considered garbage put to use in the most unconventional and artistic ways. Broken glass formed colorful murals and security systems when set in the top of concrete walls. Painted plastic packing skids walled in gardens, keeping the plethora of free-ranging goats from attacking the few struggling plants. I wondered in my journals what these builders could do if “I could only transport to them everything that I’ve thrown away as junk in the last few weeks” (03/04/05). Americans wasted while these people reused—it was a powerfully personal realization.

It is well known that there are political issues in the Dominican Republic, but I did not know what they were when I entered this nation. My first brush with a major social problem came in the form of architecture. In the town of Esperanza, poverty is high, but the crime rate seemed to be low, as we were assured by the leadership of Orphanage Outreach. Certainly, even if crime were a major factor, there was little in the poor orphanage to steal. However, the tiny grouping of buildings that comprised the orphanage was surrounded by a giant wall. At first I thought that this was to keep the children in. Yet, the children could leave by the front gate at any time, navigating the busy street beyond with practiced ease and skill. Confused, I finally found one of the leaders of the Orphanage and asked. I was told the wall was not built because of crime or any similar reason—it was built because of land. I later learned that “according to the reports of the Junta Agroempresarial Dominicana (JAD), about 40% of the land is not registered” (Gil 8). The orphanage did exist on registered land, purchased legally by a group in Puerto Rico. However, the surrounding homes were not sitting on registered land. Squatters built homes of concrete and recycled materials wherever they could. In its first year of existence, the orphanage found itself on an ever-shrinking plot of land. Homes that were destroyed in the morning were being rebuilt as early as that evening. Legal action, I was told, was a laughable idea. In desperation, the orphanage investors build a large of concrete and brick. The squatters could not build on land that they could not access—it was a clear “no trespassing” sign.

Another interesting social problem was that of electricity. More than one drawing session with the orphanage kids was interrupted by sudden darkness. Before ever leaving the United States, we were warned not to forget to bring flashlights. I found the Dominican nights to be beautiful when the power grids failed. I had never seen stars so brightly as on these nights, free of the tinge of florescent streetlights that even the remotest night sky in America never seems to entirely shake. I loved astronomy and could name the constellations in the winter sky by heart, with no book or chart to guide me. There they were, arrayed like the diamonds of the famous Beatles song in the patterns based on legends Roman and Greek. Polaris lay just above the horizon of this southern vantage point. I was ever so strange to view Orion, the hunter, who usually stocks his prey in the dead of winter, while wearing shorts and a light jacket. My fascination with viewing starts free from the evils of city glow was not, however, shared by all Dominicans. The electricity problem had turned political years before, as I later learned, increasing pressure “on President Hipolito Mejia to resolve what is euphemistically called the, “electricity crisis” (Canute 1). I, myself, had first hand experience with some of the causes of these problems, recording “you’ll never guess what serves as poles…sticks! Well sticks, and one tree…just stripped of all but the top leaves and branches. No wonder we seem to lose power at least once a day!” (03/04/05). According to a report in the financial times, what I saw were “illegal electricity taps…many Dominicans take a practical approach to electricity, regarding illegal link-ups as a form of self-help rather than theft” (Richard 15). It was a creative solution to a complex problem. However, so many Dominicans tapped into the network illegally that the system crashed entirely—and the politicians were blamed. It was an interesting and multi-faceted problem that would not soon be solved, although it must have made life as a Dominican politician interesting and undesirable.

The town of Esperanza was itself a beautiful place. As we walked through the village, I saw grown men and women sitting and speaking together in front of houses. Some in the group thought of this as a sign or extreme poverty, and some unforgivably fell back on the old American stereotype of the lazy Central American. However, there was a real sense of community, of adults stopping and taking the time to establish ties with one another. I didn’t truly understand the mentality until our group leader, Dale, related to us the favored parable of the Dominican Fisherman (see attached). It was yet another culture shock to see a group of people who did not work solely for the acquisition of goods, so very different as to be alien. Even more mind boggling to me was that many of the people that we passed smiled at us, even though we, with our cameras and backpacks, looked terribly foreign and uncomfortable. For the first time I viewed avoidance of eye contact with strangers as rude, instead of the opposite—a fact that earned me more than one offended glare when I returned to the States. I was well on my way towards falling in love with this culture and this people, when I hit a terrible snag.

Dale, one of the leaders of Orphanage Outreach, believed in working for social change, in working for the rights of all people. It was through him that many of the children in the orphanage got the chance to live a better future. On one of our last days in the orphanage, after we had gotten to know the children without judgment, Dale organized a presentation to show us why many of the children were living at the orphanage. Most of the children, we learned, were not orphans after all—they had parents and siblings outside of the orphanage that just could not take care of them. Some of the young boys had mothers who were prostitutes in the major cities, catering to the richer and more powerful in a socially stratified society. These women could not afford to take care of themselves, let alone a child. The women knew the psychological damage that a child could incur while living in such an environment, so they brought their sons to the orphanage where they would be fed and educated. These were not, however, the saddest stories. One boy was a true orphan—but of Haitian descent. The average Haitian will have different physical characteristics than the average Dominican. It is a difference primarily in skin tone—Haitians tend to have darker skin than the Dominicans and speak Kreyol, a mixture of Spanish, French, and other languages, instead of Dominican Spanish (Wucker 59). While the Dominican Republic shares an island with Haiti, this has not let to social and political equality. According to Roger Plant, author of Sugar and Modern Slaver, Haitian workers have historically been imported by the thousands to work in the Dominican sugar fields (64-67). They come from the war-torn nation of Haiti seeking higher wages and a better way of life, very much as the poor Europeans traveled en masse to America at the turn of the century. The American immigrants met with inequality and social strife, but nothing compares to what the Haitians face in the Dominican Republic. The orphaned Haitian child, we were told, was adopted by a Dominican family, who pitied him and took him into their home. However, they faced constant teasing and eventually social stigma for their decision to adopt a Haitian child. Eventually, the social pressure became too much and they left him at the orphanage to be cared for by strangers. This quiet boy had to bear the emotional scars of being orphaned twice—and once voluntarily, because of the color of his skin. Another boy, well into adolescence when I met him, was born in the Dominican Republic, but of Haitian parents. His name was Juan, and he was one of the most impressive children that I had ever met. Juan had no birth certificate, a common problem, we were told, among Haitians in the Dominican Republic. Without this document he could not graduate from high school. As one Haitian worker complained “we do all of the work, but our children cannot go to school” (Thompson 16). Juan was one of the most intelligent people that I had ever met. He actually taught himself to be fluent in English by listening to volunteers from the United States speak to each other. Juan was fluent in Spanish, English, French and Keryol, yet he could not earn a high school diploma. I did not know how to handle the injustice of this system.

Juan did have one major hope, and that was a man everyone called Reverend Joseph. This man came to speak with us volunteers one night. He spoke in French, as he was raised in Haiti and this was his native tongue, but a student translated for him. He commanded respect, with every word and action. Reverend Joseph spoke with such passion about the plight of Haitian sugar workers living in the Dominican Republic that one could not help but be moved. I had studied injustice in America, had seen for myself evidence of the injustices that the Civil Rights movement sought to end, but the images that he conjured were ten times worse than these. He was possibly the greatest man that I have ever seen, unselfishly working for a cause in which he believed completely. It was like sitting ten feet from Martin Luther King, Jr. I have never, before or since, been so moved by any speech, but I had no seen the injustices for myself and they moved to the back of my mind, still swimming with complete respect for Dominican society.

Batey Two

I was vaguely disturbed by the Haitian aspect of Dominican culture, but only vaguely until I made a snap decision. A group of students from Penn State Altoona had been working separately from the rest of us. These few could speak passable French and so were working in Haitian communities within the Dominican Republic referred to as Bateyes. Unlike the rest of we volunteers, who taught in Dominican schools, walked in the community, shoveled gravel and built buildings, and came home laughing, this group was silent at the end of the day. They were the only ones not really taking about their experiences, and I wanted to know why. So, I got permission to trade places with one of the Batey volunteers. The day began early as we traveled past fruit and sugar plantations to reach Batey Two. We pulled into a wide grass field, littered with garbage and other refuse. The houses were made of crushed gasoline cans. Children ran in the field with very little clothing and no shoes—some showing the swollen bellied and sores that are hallmarks of malnutrition and disease. We toured their hospital—an empty shack with a dirt floor. I couldn’t see that this building could have any use other than being a place to die. For the first time in my life, I saw the kind of poverty that is shown in television commercials which ask for money. In 2005, “The United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child has expressed concerns about Haitian children being denied access to education and medical care” (Thompson 17). It is one thing to read these words on a page, but it is quite another to see the aftermath in person. I saw children trying to run and play with the soccer ball that we brought them, with the full knowledge that if I returned in a year, or even a few months, some of these children would not be there. Although Juan could not graduate because of his ethnic heritage, these children had no rights at all. “Because of the turgid Dominican bureaucracy, difficult transportation, and ignorance of the importance of documents, most cane cutters do not register births with authorities…children…will be nationless, paperless…these people do not exist” (Wucker 96). No one protects these people, and it is indefinitely difficult to place the blame. According to Wucker, “International human-rights groups blame the Dominicans, but the Dominicans are not alone. The United States…has been silent on the issue” (113). I didn’t know where to place the blame for this problem, and still do not. All I knew then, as I know now is the toll of human suffering. I was nineteen, a freshman in college, and I tried to teach English to the dying children of powerless parents. The only question that I could ask myself is “why haven’t I been here?” I was being affected and changed by a happy, industrious people, while totally ignorant that this suffering existed. In some complex way, I, the successful granddaughter of immigrants, felt that I had to shoulder part of the blame. My society had changed, I had success and opportunity, and yet I didn’t know how to help these people, though I desperately wanted to—I felt guilty for my easy life. I feel this way still.

My experience in the Dominican Republic was challenging in many ways. Exposure to a new culture and different way of life challenged a cultural arrogance that I didn’t know that I had. I saw new possibilities through exposure to a society less wasteful than my own. I gained a true respect for the culture that taught me these lessons. However, I also learned that there are two sides to every story. I saw the plight of the Haitians living in the Dominican Republic, social atrocities that I could not respect, and yet I couldn’t wholly dislike the culture that produced them. I learned the most difficult lesson of the anthropologist—one must suspend judgment when looking at a culture, even when your mind is screaming that the things you see are wrong. Nothing is as simple as right and wrong. Nations, cultures, and especially people, are complex, indefinitely complicated. The experience was sobering, maturing, life-changing, and left me with one of my most central mantras—there are no simple problems, there are no easy answers.

Works Cited

Canute, James. "Power Failures Turn Up the Heat on Dominican President." London TimesProquest. Penn State University Library. 28 Mar. 2008. (2002): 5-6.

Gil, Margarita F. Security of Land Ownership in the Dominican Republic: a Legal and Historical Analysis. Diss. Univ. of Wisconson-Madison, 1999. 11 Mar. 2008 .

Lapper, Richard. "Power to the People Transformed: Management Utilities: Electricity Theft is a Part of Life in the Dominican Republic." Financial Times (2000): 15-16.

Proquest. Penn State University Library. 29 Mar. 2008.

Plant, Roger. Sugar and Modern Slavery. London, New Jersey: Zen Books Ltd., 1987.

Thompson, Ginger. "Immigrant Laborers From Haiti are Paid with Abuse in the Dominican Republic." New York Times 20 Nov. 2005: 15-19. Proquest. Penn State University Library. 20 Mar. 2008.

"Waste and Recycling: Waste Facts and Figures." Clean Air Council. 2006. Clean Air Council. 20 Mar. 2008 .

Wucker, Michele. Why the Cocks Fight: Dominicans, Haitians, and the Struggle for Hispaniola. New York: Hill and Wang, 1999.